MEMIC leverages Beautiful.ai to ensure brand control in presentation design

Presentations are not one-size-fits-all, and every industry has their own unique use case for their decks. We caught up with MEMIC— Maine Employers' Mutual Insurance Company— to see how they’re leveraging Beautiful.ai in their business.

MEMIC is a private mutual insurance company that specializes in workers’ compensation and workforce safety. The company was founded in 1993 and has since grown to 500 employees. With such a large, distributed team, having the proper communication standards in place becomes crucial to scaling a business. Not just for efficient internal communications, but for client-facing materials that align with the company’s brand. 

Giving non-designers the ability to create their own decks while maintaining brand compliance

Renée Thorington, Senior Graphic Communication Specialist at MEMIC, was instrumental in integrating Beautiful.ai with the MEMIC team. After she joined the team, she became the unofficial PowerPoint presentation designer— everyone was asking Renée to add her finishing touches to their decks. Brand compliance for the business is important, but it was costing Renée her time as a competing demand. “Sure, I was turning out these nice looking PowerPoint presentations, but it was taking days to put them together because every time somebody made a change, it often required a great deal of effort to get it to a satisfactory place,” she said of the process. Eventually the inefficiency of the design platform created enough of a bottleneck that the team started exploring other presentation software solutions. 

After a conversation about the limitations of PowerPoint, Robb Atkinson, Director of Marketing and Public Relations, came across Beautiful.ai. “I checked it out and was immediately impressed with the design options and functionality. Robb was able to socialize it within the company, and the rest is history,” says Renée.

“Now, I'm spending 20% of the time on presentations that I was spending before, and I'm doing fewer ground-up presentations because people are now creating their own using a branded template I created.” Renée adds. Beautiful.ai was able to free up more of her bandwidth without compromising brand standards. 

Maintaining brand control in real-time, on the cloud

Every year MEMIC hosts all 500 employees for a week-long retreat filled with conferences, meetings, ceremonies and awards. This year Renée was in charge of putting together the presentation for the final events, which compiled slides from different executives and teams. With various stakeholders, being able to create a visually consistent presentation was important. The outcome was that MEMIC Week was graphically consistent while covering financials, Diversity-Equity-and-Inclusion, leadership messages and company history. The punchline was that Beautiful.ai measurably helped bring it all together. “Needless to say,” said Thorington, “we’re fans of this robust platform.” 

At another public presentation, there were last minute additions. Renée was able to make the changes in Beautiful.ai and the edits were automatically pushed live to the deck without skipping a beat. “This would have been a stressful situation had I prepared the presentation in PowerPoint, not knowing exactly how formatting would be affected. So to put a Beautiful.ai presentation up on the screen and have the ability to make changes in real time was beyond convenient,” Renée explains. 

Telling a better story with good design

As an insurance company, MEMIC’s presentations tend to be number-heavy. With Beautiful.ai their data can tell a better story through more digestible graphs and charts. “I love all the options for presenting data, and love the fact that they animate on their own. Sure, you can go in and adjust the timing and cadence, but you’re already starting with something impressive.” says Renée. “It's so easy to just grab a layout and then customize it.”

Another feature that has helped them craft better decks is Smart Slides. “I have always said people who stand up in front of a big room full of people with a PowerPoint slide full of copy seemingly have little respect for the people who are watching.” She says, “The fact that Beautiful.ai doesn’t allow that much content on a slide is a big bonus as far as I'm concerned, because it forces you to stick to an amount of words on the screen that people can actually digest without losing focus on the presenter.”

Making a bigger impact on customers with more consistent design

Now that the MEMIC team has built-in, branded templates at their disposal, they’re able to distribute a more consistent look across the board, so everybody's presentations look like they’re in the same family.

Renée concludes, “Our customers are impressed with the presentations. We show up with a best-in-class presentation that has beautiful visuals and brilliant colors, everything's readable and neat and organized and clean, and it sets us apart.”